


Antiviral Programming

by pineapplesquid



Category: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Genre: Covid19 related, Gen, Murderbot just wants to stay home and watch media but humans make bad decisions, POV First Person, Pandemics, Quarantine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:55:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23988478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pineapplesquid/pseuds/pineapplesquid
Summary: For Murderbot, social distancing is more like a vacation. Humans will insist on making bad decisions, though. And if there's a security issue, someone has to deal with it. . .
Comments: 13
Kudos: 114





	Antiviral Programming

**Author's Note:**

> I've been avoiding fic about the pandemic or being in quarantine (just too real right now), but I was thinking about how much Murderbot would enjoy social distancing, and then there was an accidental fic.

These idiots were not my clients. (Yes, I know, Mensah kept trying to have conversations with me about how she and the others weren’t my clients anymore, not really. But I didn’t have another word for it. I knew the one that she wanted me to use, but it was just—no. Last time I even thought about _that,_ my performance reliability dropped by 2.5 percent. There was a pandemic going on, and this wasn’t the time for me to be anything less than my best, so I hadn't been thinking about it since).

So they weren’t my clients. And I didn’t care if they got sick, not really. But if these humans did get sick then they could give it to other humans, who would get even more humans sick. The longer that went on, the higher the probability that my clients would come into contact with someone who had it. And that _was_ my problem. I know I wasn’t officially their security anymore, but that was just because most of the time they didn’t need one, not here on Preservation. But this was a real security threat, and I wasn’t about to let my one opportunity so far to do my job go to waste.

I’m not trained for working in public health, of course—humans do most of that, the planning parts anyway, and MedBots take care of the rest of it. It’s not like the Company ever gave me any education modules on epidemiology. Up until the last couple of weeks, pretty much all I knew about it was from watching a historical series set back before MedBots were as sophisticated as they are now, where a heroic team of human doctors and researchers was going around the galaxy trying to save people from a new and terrible plague, risking themselves in the process.

But at least the humans in the show were doing it for a good reason. These idiots that I could see, some out of my window and others through the station feed, were doing it because they were bored. Or because they missed other humans, or because they were restless, or whatever. I had been enjoying staying put in my rooms—I’d never had a chance to watch so much media, uninterrupted, at least not in any kind of comfort—and I really didn’t understand why they were so desperate to talk to other humans face-to-face, but then, humans do a lot of things I don’t understand, and I was used to chalking it up to their irrational brain chemistry, which wasn’t regulated as well as mine was.

Or, at least, as well regulated as mine was supposed to be. I had my suspicions that it had gotten a bit unbalanced, but the last thing I was going to do while I was with the Company, or especially once I had gone rogue, was let someone, anyone, mess with my brain chemistry. Not even ART, not even at the end. I’d been telling myself i was going to talk to someone trustworthy about it, if I could figure out who that would be, but then all of this happened, and it stopped being a priority.

I didn’t need to know much about epidemiology, though, to know that what these humans were doing was stupid. And, more to the point, they had to know it too. The public feed had been repeating the same safety alerts every fifteen minutes for the first several days, and on the hour every hour since. And every piece of media that you downloaded over the station feed now had the warning appended to the beginning of it, not to mention the feed alerts that they must have been triggering every twenty feet or so the minute they walked out their doors.

I’m used to humans being stupid, but these humans were being really, really stupid. Like, let’s order the SecUnits to stay in their cubicles at all times so that we don't have to look at them and then accidentally set the habitat on fire. Three times. (Yes, that actually happened. No, I don’t want to talk about it). And while they could be stupid on their own time, this time they were putting _my clients_ at higher risk too. I didn’t have access to a MedSystem anymore, but I knew that Pin-Lee’s medications weren’t ones that you took if you had a healthy immune system. And while as far as I could tell Mensah wasn’t old, even for a human, I didn’t think she was young, either. Humans being stupid and having a party in one of the parks, like I could see in the feed from the central atrium (no, nobody had officially given me access to the station feeds. Yes, I had all of them anyway), or just wandering around looking for any shops that were open (which were none of them, because Mensah wasn’t an idiot and had put out orders to close them days ago), were making themselves into security threats for the humans I did actually care about.

They don’t have Sec Units on Preservation—aside from me, anyway, and my official label is a bit complicated these days, between Mensah insisting that I don’t need to work security and the legal gymnastics that Pin Lee pulled to let me stay here—so I couldn’t do what I really wanted to, which was put on my armor and go out there and tell them they had to go home, with the unspoken but very clear understanding that if they didn’t, I would make them.

What I did have, though, was a bundle of fabric that had been in a package that Pin-Lee had left behind in my rooms several weeks ago. She had done an ok job of acting like she’d simply forgotten to take it with her when she left, but reviewing the footage showed her eyes flicking back towards it several times as she walked out the door, which meant that there had been plenty of opportunities for her to come back for it if she’d wanted to. I’d waited until all of the humans had left, and then opened it up. It was a full set of the uniforms that the humans who did the low-level security for Preservation wore—people who would be called Station Security or Station Police elsewhere, although here they only had a subset of those duties. I’d put them away in the bottom of a drawer. The last thing I actually wanted was to go out and talk to humans I didn’t know, but even I had to admit that the uniform might come in useful some day.

So I put it on, only wishing a little bit that I could have worn my armor instead. I compromised by getting out another gift from one of my humans. Well, one of the humans I knew, anyway. Gurathin had given them to me as a joke, I think, but the large mirrored glasses were actually the closest thing to an opaqued faceplate that I’d seen humans on Preservation wear. They weren't common on the station, but they laso weren't unusual enough to attract attention when I wore them, and as long as I remembered to set my pupils to be slightly more dilated, they didn’t impede my vision either. I didn’t like to thank Gurathin for anything, so I didn’t, but I did wear the glasses.

I slid them on and took a second to check myself in the room’s camera feed. The uniform worked. I’d pass for one of the humans, but unlike them, I wasn’t at risk of catching the disease. Or spreading it to anyone else. I don't have an immune system, but I also don't have most of the bits that pathogens actually infect, and it's not that hard for me to make the parts of me that are cloned tissue inhospitible to outside microorganisms. I washed my hands, carefully timing the 25 seconds I took to do it. Then, for the first time in days, I opened my front door. Time to make some stupid humans go home.


End file.
